Category: Media

The media suddenly notices the CDC is clueless
CNN has declared the agency ‘a punchline,’ but that has more to do with politics than health

For over a year, the national news media has held up the CDC and it’s director, Rochelle Walensky, as paragons of public health. It’s no coincidence they’ve now suddenly had a moment of clarity as it pertains to the CDC adjusting its pandemic protocols.

This epiphany is happening primarily at CNN, with ratio king Chris Cillizza coming around to reality on Twitter and declaring that blue staters, journalists, and Democratic politicians catching Covid isn’t a moral failing and shouldn’t be shamed (the Washington Post made a similar statement).

This past Sunday, CNN hall monitors Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy actually went after the CDC, saying it appears the agency has become “a punchline.” That segment also featured Dr. Lucy McBride, who warned that some medical professionals are fanning the flames of panic, with accompanying chyrons like “Is the media out of touch with the country about Covid?” and “Covid and the doomsday-doctor problem.”

No doubt it’s a good thing that CNN’s worst actors have suddenly come around to what CDC skeptics have been saying for over a year, and are facing consequences for waiting so long. The last guy to figure things out has finally figured the thing out.

Yet to save Stelter, Darcy and their network any more embarrassment, let me put it bluntly: the CDC lost the faith of the American people last year when business owners were forced to stay home and parents were forced to pull their kids out of school, yet social justice protesters and leftist activists were permitted to flood the streets in protest. You weren’t allowed to open your business, but they were allowed to burn it down.

Since then, amid this overnight changing of “the science” with little to explain it other than Joe Biden’s poll numbers, members of mainstream media have suddenly changed their tune on the never-ending pandemic measures. Simply put: the writing is on the wall for the upcoming midterm elections and they are making their adjustments accordingly at the behest of an administration flailing over its broken promise to “shut down the virus.”

The media’s sudden about-face is not because they now hastily agree with those on the opposite side of the political aisle. Stelter and others are simply trying to moderate their message now that “the good ones” are starting to catch Covid. This is about hierarchy. Journalists and Democrats are experiencing the same draconian-lite measures that the rest of the country has had to go through for the past year, and they are finding them very inconvenient, both to their own lives and to Joe Biden’s approval ratings.

This appears to be a warning shot across the bow to the CDC and Walenksy, who are primed to take the fall as the Biden administration dramatically shifts its messaging on Covid in the coming weeks. The problem for CNN and Brian Stelter is that this attempt looks politicized, forced, and completely cynical. Probably because it is.

BLUF:
……as violent crime soared in the 1990s, states expanded gun rights in the form of concealed carry, driving violent crime down.
I’m sorry, but unless you have an answer for that, I don’t really care what you have to say
And when it comes to the Rittenhouse case, the only takeaway is that when you’re faced with a violent mob, you need all the firepower you can manage.

There are no gun control lessons out of Rittenhouse trial

Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of murder by a jury. Even before that, though, we know he was innocent of all charges because we watched the whole thing unfold on video. We knew he was innocent.

Now, though, Rittenhouse is a free man, but some are using his situation to try and advance gun control.

No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yet this isn’t the first op-ed I’ve seen that tried to make that case.

As the country awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a New York state case that may create a federal constitutional right to carry guns outside the home, what lessons can the nation draw from the recent acquittal in Wisconsin of Kyle Rittenhouse and the convictions in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia?

The obvious first lesson is that no one would be dead, maimed or going to prison if the men in these cases had not possessed firearms or had just left their weapons at home. The man Rittenhouse maimed learned that his self-proclaimed constant gun carrying not only did not protect him or others, but simply added him to the victim count when he pointed his gun at Rittenhouse.

No, we didn’t learn any such lesson.

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SAF LAUNCHES HUGE TV EFFORT WARNING OF ‘UNPRECEDENTED ASSAULT’ ON 2A RIGHTS

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today announced a huge new TV effort launching the week of Jan. 3 to warn America of a coming attack on Second Amendment rights.

SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said the foundation’s message will be broadcast 220 times during the first week on more than 20 cable television networks.

“The well-financed gun prohibition movement is poised to strike in an effort to make up for lost time due to Joe Biden’s failure to get the gun prohibition agenda through during his first year in office,” Gottlieb said. “We’re expecting an unprecedented assault on Second Amendment rights heading into the new year. Anti-gunners will grasp at straws to grab every headline they can, and make no mistake, they are determined to help Biden go after your rights in 2022.

“That’s why we’re kicking off the New Year with a record number of pro-gun rights TV spots in a single week,” he added. “The threat to our Second Amendment rights cannot be over-stated. The billionaire-backed gun ban lobby is fearful of a gun rights ruling from the Supreme Court this summer, and a power flip at the mid-term elections, so they will be pushing Biden and their allies on Capitol Hill and in several states to get things done now, before they lose the political muscle to push their agenda.”

SAF will broadcast its 60-second message on several networks including CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax TV, One America News Network, Destination America, Bloomberg, BBC America, Discovery Channel, American Heroes Channel, SYFY (Science Fiction), TLC (The Learning Channel), TruTV, DirecTV, The Weather Channel, HLN, Dish TV, and CNBC.

“There is no time to waste,” Gottlieb cautioned. “We’re going to hit the ground running in order to grab the high ground and block the momentum of an anti-rights movement determined to smash the right to keep and bear arms. We’ll be asking viewers to call a special toll-free telephone number – (888) 762-0221 – to help in this battle, because once you lose your rights, you will never get them back.”

Inconvenient studies get buried by the media

A couple of months back–or last year, if you care to look at it that way–Cam wrote about an interesting study that took a look at the impact of Massachusetts gun laws. Or, more precisely, the lack of any real impact. It’s one of the more interesting studies we’ve seen lately.

And then we don’t see it much of anywhere else.

Oh, it pops up here or there. I came across it at a site that basically just reports on studies.

While Congress has yet to pass nationwide gun control legislation measures, some state legislatures have enacted stricter gun control laws aimed at reducing violence in their communities. However, a recent study finds gun laws in at least one state aren’t doing that job. A team at American University analyzed the impact of one such measure in Massachusetts and found stricter background checks and licensing policies made little to no difference in curbing violent crimes.

In light of these results, study authors ponder if officials are doing enough to enforce these new policies.

“Gun violence remains at the forefront of the public policy debate when it comes to enacting new or strengthening existing gun legislation in the United States,” explains study author Janice Iwama, assistant professor of justice, law, and criminology at AU, in a media release. “Yet the political polarization and relatively limited scholarly research on guns and gun violence make it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to enact and implement legislation that addresses the public health and safety issues associated with gun violence.”

…

Using this approach, the research team was able to estimate, based on percentage of firearms licenses, that one to five percent of adult Massachusetts residents had a gun license. However, results also show the new gun control measures did not have a “consistent effect” on reducing four types of violent crimes — murder or manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape.

Notably, a one-percent increase in denied firearm licenses and denied firearm licenses following statutory disqualifications increased robberies by 7.3 and 8.9 percent, respectively.

Now, this is an interesting study, and it’s something we should have had significant debate over. We should have run a dozen or so posts discussing it and responding to others who addressed this.

Instead, what we got was the digital version of crickets chirping.

It wasn’t absolute silence, but it was damn close. The Boston Herald reported it, but that’s probably the largest publication to do so. This wasn’t reported on CNN or MSNBC so far as I can tell. There wasn’t a New York Times or Chicago Sun story about it, either. I can’t say it just vanished because it’s still popping up in niche sites, but it just wasn’t really news.

Why?

Of course, we all know why. It runs counter to the media’s preferred narrative that gun control is a net benefit for society and we should enact more of it. In fact, it directly proves that’s not necessarily the case.

So, they simply pretend it didn’t happen.

Had the study found the opposite, I have little doubt it would have been heralded from the hills. We’d have been inundated with reports about what the study proved.

Instead, we get silence.

Meanwhile, this same media is absolutely baffled that trust in them is so low.

See, this is part of how media bias works. It’s not just how the stories are written/reported, but also what stories are reported. This one is, to steal from Al Gore, an inconvenient truth, so they’re hoping you’ll just forget about it.

Inconvenient studies get buried by the media

A couple of months back–or last year, if you care to look at it that way–Cam wrote about an interesting study that took a look at the impact of Massachusetts gun laws. Or, more precisely, the lack of any real impact. It’s one of the more interesting studies we’ve seen lately.

And then we don’t see it much of anywhere else.

Oh, it pops up here or there. I came across it at a site that basically just reports on studies.

While Congress has yet to pass nationwide gun control legislation measures, some state legislatures have enacted stricter gun control laws aimed at reducing violence in their communities. However, a recent study finds gun laws in at least one state aren’t doing that job. A team at American University analyzed the impact of one such measure in Massachusetts and found stricter background checks and licensing policies made little to no difference in curbing violent crimes.

In light of these results, study authors ponder if officials are doing enough to enforce these new policies.

“Gun violence remains at the forefront of the public policy debate when it comes to enacting new or strengthening existing gun legislation in the United States,” explains study author Janice Iwama, assistant professor of justice, law, and criminology at AU, in a media release. “Yet the political polarization and relatively limited scholarly research on guns and gun violence make it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to enact and implement legislation that addresses the public health and safety issues associated with gun violence.”

…

Using this approach, the research team was able to estimate, based on percentage of firearms licenses, that one to five percent of adult Massachusetts residents had a gun license. However, results also show the new gun control measures did not have a “consistent effect” on reducing four types of violent crimes — murder or manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape.

Notably, a one-percent increase in denied firearm licenses and denied firearm licenses following statutory disqualifications increased robberies by 7.3 and 8.9 percent, respectively.

Now, this is an interesting study, and it’s something we should have had significant debate over. We should have run a dozen or so posts discussing it and responding to others who addressed this.

Instead, what we got was the digital version of crickets chirping.

It wasn’t absolute silence, but it was damn close. The Boston Herald reported it, but that’s probably the largest publication to do so. This wasn’t reported on CNN or MSNBC so far as I can tell. There wasn’t a New York Times or Chicago Sun story about it, either. I can’t say it just vanished because it’s still popping up in niche sites, but it just wasn’t really news.

Why?

Of course, we all know why. It runs counter to the media’s preferred narrative that gun control is a net benefit for society and we should enact more of it. In fact, it directly proves that’s not necessarily the case.

So, they simply pretend it didn’t happen.

Had the study found the opposite, I have little doubt it would have been heralded from the hills. We’d have been inundated with reports about what the study proved.

Instead, we get silence.

Meanwhile, this same media is absolutely baffled that trust in them is so low.

See, this is part of how media bias works. It’s not just how the stories are written/reported, but also what stories are reported. This one is, to steal from Al Gore, an inconvenient truth, so they’re hoping you’ll just forget about it.

CNN Now Openly Questioning President Biden’s Mental Health

It is widely understood that CNN trends to the left.  They don’t seem to be denying it any more, so why should anyone else?  The mainstream media in America is now widely understood to be partisan entertainment, and that’s just fine.  In many ways, it helps us gauge the truthiness of what we’re hearing, understanding that it comes through a filter of political spin.

So when the liberal-leaning network actually suggests that President Joe Biden’s mental capacity is slipping, it’s important to stand up and take notice.

A CNN correspondent said Wednesday that Joe Biden ‘seemed confused’ in his ABC News interview earlier this week, when the president appeared to mix up COVID-19 at-home tests and antiviral pills.

Biden, 79, spoke to ABC’s David Muir for 20 minutes in an interview that aired on Wednesday and defended his administration against criticism of its handling of the pandemic and readiness for the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, but also admitting that there were certain mistakes made.

When asked about complaints that the lines to get tested for COVID-19 were excessive, with waits of over five hours in New York City as one example, Biden said that 500 million at-home tests had been ordered.

But several times he referred to the tests as ‘pills’ – potentially thinking of the Pfizer antiviral pills, which were federally approved on the same day.

CNN didn’t mince their words.

‘Repeatedly throughout this interview – President Biden seems confused and was confusing the half a billion tests that they’ve ordered with a half a billion pills,’ said Jeff Zeleny, CNN’s chief national affairs correspondent.

While the move is certainly surprising, at least in terms of CNN’s willingness to espouse such an idea, some of the confusion that we’ve seen from the President is undeniable.

Certainly more to his brand of proggie politics. Good riddance
FYI CNN+ is supposed to come online early next year as an internet ‘streaming’ channel

Chris Wallace Leaves Fox News for CNN+

On Sunday, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace announced that is departing the network “effective immediately,” and will be joining CNN+ to host a weekday show. Wallace announced his abrupt departure at the end of Fox News Sunday, the show which he had hosted since 2003, according to CNN….

Lefties Freak out on Conservatives for Doing Exactly What They Told Them to Do

and someone asked for an example of the leftist echo chamber?

Question O’ The Day
So… what’s the point of this article? They’re arguing that self-defense cases involving guns demands a higher level of scrutiny than self-defense cases that don’t involve guns, then seem to imply that there is a systemic issue of allowing judges to determine foregone conclusions (like they can in many contexts) when deciding the facts of a case. Then they proceed to use two high-profile cases as an example, then admit that neither case involved a foregone conclusion.

Seriously, what point are they trying to make, exactly?

Both the display of a firearm and the pointing of a firearm at another person are threatening acts that ordinarily would create a reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily injury in another person, and thus should be viewed as prima facie evidence of aggression.

This is their point:
They want the mere existence of a visible gun on your person to remove your right to defend yourself.

When it comes to guns and claims of self-defense, juries need guidance
As a general matter, a criminal defendant loses the right to claim he acted justifiably in self-defense if he was the initial aggressor or provocateur

Jurors in two recent high-profile homicide cases involving guns and claims of self-defense have spoken. In one case, the jury found the defendant, Kyle Rittenhouse, not guilty on all homicide charges. In the other case, the jury found Greg and Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan guilty of murder in the death of Ahmaud Arbery.

Important factual differences contributed to the different verdicts in these cases. The skill sets of the attorneys and dispositions of the judges involved played a role as well.

One thing both cases had in common, however, was that each judge gave the jury an initial-aggressor or provocation instruction. The fact that the juries in the two cases were given such an instruction yet reached opposite conclusions indicates that the mere giving of such an instruction in self-defense cases will not predetermine the outcome.

Until these two cases, few people were aware of the initial-aggressor limitation on the defense of self-defense. Now, that limitation has become part of the national conversation.

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How to Lie About Guns, New York Times Style

One of the easiest ways to lie and not get sued for libel is to simply do so through exclusion. The New York Times is famous for this and if you don’t know enough about guns they can make things sound pretty bad, just by leaving out a little bit of information. In the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict we ought to brush up on the tactics of far-left media. To do so, we simply just need to look to the past. Back in March of 2021, I found an article so egregious that I decided to go ahead and fill in the blanks. I believe the resulting work should be saved and used to inform anybody who is arguing for more gun control without all of the facts. For reference the original article can be found here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/us/ruger-ar-556-boulder-shooting.html

You’ll see that the author is attempting to paint Ruger’s AR-15 pistol and the 5.56 round in a darker light than it deserves.

The article opens with the basic facts and uses that tired old phrases like “military-style semiautomatic rifle and pistol.” Of course, the author leaves out that they are “military-style” in appearance only. Camouflaging a Kia doesn’t make it an M1 Abrams tank. As the piece starts to “develop,” the author also goes on to write, “Statements from the police and the charging documents did not make it clear which of the weapons was used in the attack, but it appeared at least one is a semiautomatic derivative of the assault rifles that have long been used by the American military.”

For starters, holy long sentence Batman. I had to read it a few times to keep up with it all, leaving just the catchphrases like “assault rifles” and “American military” to stand out. However, if you read it a few times you pick up what is being said. The guns being referenced are derivatives as opposed to copies because they are semi-automatic, like a common pistol. This is unlike the military’s fully automatic M4 carbines. Only folks who know guns are going to know that and only a few are going to be that dedicated to pull all of that from this poorly structured sentence.

Later on, I found what is arguably the poorest display of journalism in the entire article. The author goes on to state, “According to a police affidavit, the suspect charged with 10 counts of murder, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, bought a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic weapon, essentially a shortened version of an AR-15 style rifle marketed as a pistol, six days before the killings took place. It is also unclear if that weapon was used in the shooting on Monday.”

Wait…if  it’s “unclear” that this gun was used at all, why does this article include this statement? Actually, why is there even an article entitled “What we know about the gun used in the Boulder shooting” in existence? The Times didn’t need 284 words to put this piece together, thanks to this statement I can do it with just one, “Nothing.”

About halfway through is where I found the most manipulative piece of information and this is where the author states “Both the AR-15 style rifle and the Ruger version fire the same small-caliber, high-velocity ammunition, which was first developed for battlefield use.” Sure, the 5.56 was built for the military… To replace the current, larger cartridge that was regarded as uncontrollable and too powerful for common battlefield use! I’ve had enough with media like this trying to make the 5.56 round out to be some sort of baby-killing monster. It’s one of the least-potent centerfire rifle rounds on the market, considered by most to be too small even for deer hunting. Is it more powerful than a pistol round? Sure, but almost any given rifle has more power than any given handgun.

As things begin to wrap up the author proceeds to attempt to make large-format pistols look like the “ideal” tool for mass shootings where she says “Based on their size, ‘AR pistols’ are much easier to conceal than a typical AR-15 carbine or rifle. According to the manufacturer’s website, the Ruger AR-556 pistol comes with either a 9.5-inch or 10.5 inch-long barrel, while a typical AR-15 has at least a 16-inch barrel.” Pretty convenient that she left out the fact that common pistols have barrels from 2 to 6 inches and are capable of the same rate of fire and in most cases, capacity. So although an AR Pistol is easier to conceal than a rifle or shotgun, it’s far less concealable than many other semi-automatic firearms.

As a New Yorker, I have been conditioned to read between the lines and sadly that’s where you are going to find the facts in dribble like this. It’s a shame that our publication doesn’t reach the same people who read the Times, because it would be nice to give the Times’s readership a complete and balanced idea of what that this firearm is—and more importantly what it isn’t. This, my friends, is why we must remain vigilant and never shy away from the conversation. We can only change an informed mind and that duty lies squarely at our feet.

Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie
The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.

As far as corporate media are concerned, the massacre in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday was a “Christmas parade crash.”

That’s how the attack that killed six people and injured more than 60 others is being described by ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Newsweek and others. Not an intentional attack, not a massacre allegedly committed by a violent career criminal already facing multiple felony charges, but merely a crash. The New York Times is calling it a “tragedy.”

Not to be outdone by major news outlets, The Daily Beast rushed to remind its readers that “there are no indications of any additional motive for the Waukesha killings, or any reasons to label it domestic terrorism. That didn’t stop these right-wing trolls.”Oh no we wouldn’t want to assign ideological motives to a case too soon. But these damn right-wing trolls sure will! No mention from the Beast, of course, of the worst possible example of that in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which every major news organization gladly went along with.

Here’s the thing. The next time you read an article in the New York Times or the Atlantic, watch a bit of breaking news on MSNBC or a panel on CNN, or hear a report on NPR, your default assumption should be that what you are reading, watching, or hearing is not true. Either it is an outright falsehood, a distortion of the facts, or not the whole story. That should be your posture toward literally every piece of news you consume from corporate media from now on.

There is ample justification for such a posture. It’s justified by every single major news story in recent years — the Russia collusion hoax, the origins of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the debate over Covid vaccines, the January 6 riot, and especially the Rittenhouse trial, to name just a few. Every one of these stories, and many more besides, were dishonestly reported by a corrupt media establishment that you should never trust again.

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The Second Amendment Ain’t That Complicated

When looking at the Bill of Rights, it becomes clear that the Second Amendment is pretty important. After all, it’s second in the list of amendments. Additionally, the First Amendment preserves a number of specific rights, whereas the Second is focused on a single right. That suggests some importance for that particular right.

For many of us, we’ve referred to as the insurance policy on the Bill of Rights. After all, your right to protest or worship as you see fit can be snatched away by any government willing to ignore words on a piece of paper. Having the right to keep and bear arms means a potentially tyrannical government will have to account for a populace that is both armed and outnumbers them.

But some have managed to take this relatively simple concept and make it complicated.

That’s at play in a recent editorial that appeared in several newspapers, but appears to have originated from the L.A. Times:

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a mess, a muddle, a grammatically challenged pair of clauses that allows two or more readers to insist that it says two starkly different things, both of which are of life-or-death importance and each of which can be only partially defended.

To some, it is foremost the militia amendment, plainly referring to “the people” as a collective entity and embodying a young, rebellious nation’s mistrust of professional standing armies in favor of armed citizens banding together at times of crisis.

Yet to others, it is primarily the gun-rights clause, safeguarding an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, notwithstanding the clear references to “the security of a free state” and the lack of any mention of individual rights.

The drafters of the Bill of Rights were learned men who knew how to write, so there must have been some reason for them to submit these oddly assembled 27 words that give us such trouble today. They most likely disagreed over the place of firearms in American society. Was their primary and most contentious purpose to defend the nation (against foreign invaders, but perhaps also against the abuses of their own government)? Or was it for shooting squirrels for the dinner table (and defending against slave revolts and Indian uprisings)?

I’m going to give the writer credit. For once, they at least acknowledge that we have an argument at least as equally valid as the gun control crowd’s.

Usually, they simply pretend we’re making stuff up.

However, I have to point out that the Second Amendment really isn’t that difficult to understand.

Let’s start by addressing the militia clause for a moment. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” is an introductory clause, but it doesn’t actually carry much weight grammatically. You can purge it from the sentence and it still makes sense. Trust me, I use way too many introductory clauses in my own writing. I’m well versed in what they are.

But even if it’s not, the claim that “the people” refers to a collective group should be problematic for each and every person in this country, even if you don’t like guns.

After all, “the people” are referred to multiple times in the Bill of Rights. At no other point does it seem to refer to a collective right except with regard to the right to keep and bear arms. Now, why would the Founding Fathers write it that way?

Oh, and it’s highly unlikely that our Founding Fathers disagreed over the place of firearms in American society. These aren’t the vanguard of an ancient civilization lost to time. Their writings still exist, preserved by a society that recognized the importance of their words. We have many comments about preserving the right to gun ownership. We also have stories of these same men carrying firearms with them as they passed through the city.

What we don’t have, though, are any references to them believing that the right to gun ownership should be limited.

I mean, the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue letters of marque, empowering privateers to hunt the shipping of our nation’s enemies. That at least suggests that the private ownership of artillery was on the table. If they were unwilling to restrict cannons, then why should we believe they were accepting of any other restriction.

The fact is that there’s no evidence to suggest our Founding Fathers struggled with the role of guns in our society. Quite the contrary, actually, they not only accepted them but felt that they were a necessity for maintaining a free society.

The editorial goes on later to argue:

In some parts of the country, people still do use guns to put food on the table, for sport or simply as an attribute of their lifestyle. Gun-toting behavior that would be natural and acceptable in, say, rural Pennsylvania, would be menacing and is wisely prohibited in downtown Los Angeles. For now.

In issuing a ruling in the case currently before it, the Supreme Court may well strike down not merely New York’s permit requirements but also California’s, and those of the six other states that reserve the right to grant or deny permits based on the applicant’s reason for wanting one.

States have long made their own decisions about how to balance residents’ safety with their gun rights, based on the values expressed by voters at the polls and their representatives in the legislature.

This, of course, is in reference to the case before the Supreme Court, as is most of the editorial. The editorial board responsible for this one argues that these restrictions are good and necessary.

However, as I’ve already illustrated and as the courts have found, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. That means restricting people from exercising that right based on a subjective interpretation of need is an infringement of that right. You can’t argue otherwise without simply pretending the right doesn’t exist.

The truth is, the Second Amendment isn’t that complicated.

*gasp* Horrors! *faint*

CNN: ‘Americans Are Buying More Guns Than Ever Before’

CNN used a Tuesday column on the decline in gun control support to affirm “Americans are buying more guns than ever before.”

CNN pointed out that Democrat House members have passed gun control that the Senate is not even expected to consider, as “support for gun control just hit its lowest point in almost decade.”

They pointed to a Gallup survey showing only 52 percent of Americans support stricter gun control. That is the lowest level of gun control support since 2014.

CNN also acknowledged a new Quinnipiac Poll, which found 48 percent of registered voters oppose stricter gun control.

CNN observed: “Americans are buying more guns than ever before. In 2020, nearly 23 million guns were bought — a record. That surge has continued through 2021.”

On September 9, 2021, the National Shootings Sports Foundation looked at numbers from the first six months of 2021 and estimated there were 3.2 million first-time gun purchasers during that time-frame.

The USA Today editorial board are liars

The USA Today editorial board is incoherent and/or has a reading comprehension problem and/or is lying. And they tell the lie that they believe an inanimate object can be guilty:

Kyle Rittenhouse may be innocent, but not the assault-style rifles are (once again) guilty in deadly shooting

He said the weapon was a key reason he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum during the mayhem. “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would have used it and killed me with it,” Rittenhouse testified during the trial.

Demonstrators saw the shooting and chased after Rittenhouse in an apparent effort to disarm him. One of them was Anthony Huber armed only with a skateboard. Huber grabbed the barrel of the AR-15, and Rittenhouse shot him to death.

“The irony of the case is that Mr. Rittenhouse has become a cause célèbre among gun-rights advocates, even though, according to his own defense, it was his carrying of the rifle that put him in danger in the first place,” the Economist noted.

Rittenhouse said no such thing. And they quoted the testimony which refutes their claim! The key reason for all legal use of lethal force is the reasonable fear of imminent severe injury or death. Rittenhouse articulated this well, repeatedly, and the video supports his claims. Without the rifle Rosenbaum would still have been outraged at his dumpster fire, being pushed into a gas station, being put out with the fire extinguisher. And that outrage led to Rittenhouse being chased by Rosenbaum and others. And when they cornered him without the rifle they almost certainly would have caused him severe injury or death. Hence, the rifle cannot be the “key reason” justifying the use of deadly force.

They are also liars:

Such weapons were expressly designed for the battlefield, and that may be a good part of their appeal.

Wrong. Such weapons are expressly designed to be easy to shoot, maintain, carry, economical, and accurate. They are the most common rifle sold in the United States and no AR-15 style rifle has ever been issued to a military for battlefield use (the AR-15 is semi-auto, militaries all use select fire rifles).

The primacy of assault-style rifles in American society is not a Second Amendment issue. When the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia authored a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 underscoring the Second Amendment’s right to possess firearms, he said the freedom is “not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever.”

This must be a deliberate lie. Here is the complete quote from the 2008 Heller decision (emphasis added):

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”

I cannot imagine having read to middle of page 54 to pluck the “not unlimited” quote they did not read to the top of page 55 and see the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”

Being the most popular rifle style sold in the United States the AR-15 qualifies as “in common use”. Hence, the AR-15 is protected by the Second Amendment.

Main stream media being deceitful… again?
Where’s that Gomer Pyle meme when you need it?

‘But CNN said …’ Yet *another* media narrative goes up in smoke as Waukesha Police set the record straight on suspect Darrell E. Brooks

In the wake of the deadly incident at a Waukesha Christmas parade yesterday, media have been circling the wagons around suspect Darrell E. Brooks, touting a narrative that Brooks may have driven his SUV into all those people because he was fleeing from the scene of another crime. Because if that were the case, it would mean that he didn’t mean to injure and kill anyone.

A lot of outlets were going with that.

 

 

 

Well, according to law enforcement — like, law enforcement willing to go on video, on record — Brooks was, in fact, not being pursued by police when he mowed down parade attendees:

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Defeat the Lies of Gun Control with Facts

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace went on a rant that targeted conservative media and the Second Amendment. It’s one that Second Amendment supporters should pay some heed to, even though Wallace these days is little more than a Beltway version of Regina George.

Wallace may be a NeverTrump “mean girl” these days, but she also was – at least putatively – a one-time Second Amendment supporter (and she worked for a President who appointed two of the five justices in the Heller majority). She also was a White House communications director, and as much as we may want to dismiss her, dummies don’t become White House communications directors. People who show loyalty and competence usually get that job.

This is why her claim that America has a gun crisis needs to be taken on, forcefully. Like David Frum’s lie about responsible gun ownership and the phony bologna claims about the origins of the Second Amendment from Carol Anderson (via the ACLU), we must push back. These lies are not small potatoes.

How do we fight back? With the facts.

Some of these facts come from looking over the latest FBI stats. In 2020, a total of 455 homicides were carried out with rifles, with another 203 carried out by shotguns. To put that into perspective, “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet, etc.) killed 662 people or more than rifles and shotguns of all types combined. Handguns and “firearms, type not stated” were used in 8,209 and 4,863 homicides, respectively.

There are roughly 150 million handguns in the United States, according to an NRA-ILA Fact Sheet. That means in 2020, .0054 percent of handguns were used in homicides or one in 18,272.627603. It should be noted that since the landmark Heller ruling in 2008, the Supreme Court has held that handgun bans are unconstitutional.

The next fact that Wallace ignores is that we know what has caused the latest upswing in violent crime: No prosecuting the violent offenders. Take some of the outrageous decisions from Chicago, for instance, or for the prosecutors whose campaigns George Soros has funded. Even if authorities can’t get murder charges perhaps some of the rarely-used provisions of 18 USC 922 and 18 USC 924 could make a dent. The problem is, these aren’t used, and similar state-level provisions also aren’t used.

Second Amendment supporters can debate the wisdom of various gun laws, but the laws that Project Exile enforced can and would make a huge difference in the places that are seeing the worst of violent crime. Part of the way dishonest hacks and anti-Second Amendment extremists will sell the false notion of a ”gun crisis” (especially in the “public health” arena) is to point to murder rates and violent crime.

The ultimate task for Second Amendment supporters is to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local level – not to mention in corporate boardrooms and elsewhere. However, to do that, they need to not only prove claims of a “gun crisis” are phony, they need to show that the solution to the real crisis is not found in attacking the Second Amendment.

The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

Take this, for instance, from CNN:

 

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MSNBC producer suspected of trying to follow Rittenhouse jurors, judge says

11:56 a.m.:  Preceding court session involved a NBC reporter caught following the jury bus.  Judge has thrown NBC generally out of the courthouse.

11:23 a.m.:  Parties in court, judge on bench, something is up.

The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial banned MSNBC News from the courthouse Thursday after he said a person who identified himself as a producer was suspected of trying to follow a bus containing jurors.

In response, NBC issued a statement that said: “Last night, a free lancer received a traffic citation. While the traffic violation took place near the jury van, the freelancer never contacted or intended to contact the jurors during deliberations, and never photographed or intended to photograph them. We regret the incident and will fully cooperate with the authorities on any investigation.”

Kenosha police said earlier Thursday morning that a person was taken into custody after being suspected of trying to photograph jurors.

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